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Ebook has 413 lines and 25881 words, and 9 pages

US and THE BOTTLE MAN

EDITH BALLINGER PRICE

Greg rigged himself up as an Excavator We hoped the Bottle Man would like the letter "Hang on, Chris!" Jerry said. "I can get it" "Ye be Three Poore Mariners"

It began with Jerry's finishing off all the olives that were left, "like a pig would do," as Greg said. His finishing the olives left us the bottle, of course, and there is only one natural thing to do with an empty olive-bottle when you're on a water picnic. That is, to write a message as though you were a shipwrecked mariner, and seal it up in the bottle and chuck it as far out as ever you can.

We'd all gone over to Wecanicut on the ferry,--Mother and Aunt Ailsa and Jerry and Greg and I,--and we were picnicking beside the big fallen-over slab that looks just like the entrance to a pirate cave. We had a fire, of course, and a lot of things to eat, including the olives, which were a fancy addition bought by Aunt Ailsa as we were running for the ferry.

When we asked her if she had any paper, she tore a perfectly nice leaf out of her sketch-book, and gave me her 3 B drawing-pencil to write with. It was very soft, and the paper was the roughish kind that comes in sketch-books, so that the writing was smeary and looked quite as if shipwrecked mariners had written it with charred twigs out of the fire. We'd done lots of messages when we were on other water picnics, but we'd never heard from any of them, although one reason for that was that we never put our address on them. We decided we would this time, because Jerry had just been reading about a fisherman in Newfoundland picking up a message that somebody had chucked from a yacht in the Gulf of Mexico months and months before.

I wrote the date at the top, near the raggedy place where the leaf was torn out of Aunt Ailsa's sketch-book, and then I put, "We be Three Poore Mariners," like the song in "Pan-Pipes."

Jerry and Greg kept telling me things to write, till the page was quite full and went something like this:

"We be Three Poore Mariners, cast away upon the lone and desolate shore of Wecanicut, an island in the Atlantic Ocean, lat. and long. unknown. Our position is very perilous, as we have exhausted all our supplies, including large stores of olives, and are now forced to exist on beach-peas, barnacles, and--and--"

"Eiligugs' eggs," said Greg, dreamily.

"Don't sign it 'Christine'," Jerry said. "Put 'Chris,' if we're to be real mariners."

So I put "Chris Holford, aet. 13," which I thought might look more dignified and scholarly than "aged," and Jerry wrote "Gerald M. Holford," and put "aet. 11" after it, but I'm sure he didn't know what it meant until I did it. Then we stuck the paper at Greg, and he stared at it ever so long and finally said:

"Ate eleven! He ate lots more than that; I saw him."

Jerry pounced again,--I was laughing too hard to,--and said:

"It's not olives, silly; it's an abbreviated French way of saying how old we are."

This time we didn't ask her to, because she was reading a book by H.G. Wells to Mother, and anyway all our proceedings were supposed to be going on in the most Stealthy and Silent Secrecy. The moidores and the Persian coin were all that was left of an enormous lot of things which the villainous band had buried,--golden chains, and uncut jewels, and pots of louis d'ors, and church chalices . Greg and Jerry had dragged all these things up from the edge of the water in big empty armfuls, and we stamped the sand down over them. It really looked exactly as if the tinfoil moidores were a handful that was left over. Greg was just giving the final stamp, when Jerry crooked his hand over his ear and said:

"Hist, men! What was that?" They were having artillery practice down at the Fort, and just then a terrific volley went sputtering off.

"'Tis a broadside from the English vessel!" Jerry said. "We are pursued!"

We crept out from the cave and made off up the shore as fast as possible. Jerry went ahead and jumped up on a rock to reconnoiter. He did look quite piratical, with my black sailor tie bound tight over his head and two buttons of his shirt undone. Greg had his own necktie wrapped around his head, but several locks of hair had escaped from under it. He always manages to have something not quite right about his costumes. He has very nice hair--curly, and quite amberish colored--but it's not at all like a pirate's. I poked him from behind to make him hurry, for Jerry was pointing at a big schooner that was coming down the harbor. We all lay down flat behind the rock until she had gone slowly around the point. We could see the sun winking on something that might have been a cannon in her waist--that's the place where cannon always are--and of course the captain must have been keeping a sharp lookout landward with his spy-glass.

"Eh, mon," said Jerry, when the schooner had passed, "but yon was a verra close thing!"

"Silence, dog!" I said, to remind him of who we were. "Very like she's but hove to in the offing, and for aught you know she's maybe sending ashore the jolly-boat by now."

"Then let's go to the end of the point and have a look," Greg suggested.

"Ah ha!" Jerry said, "safe once more from an ignominious death. But, Chris, look at the Sea Monster! What's happened to it?"

But the thing that Jerry was pointing out now was very queer indeed. It was just a little too far away to see clearly what had happened, but it seemed as if a piece of rock had fallen away on the side toward us, leaving a jaggedy opening as black as a hat and high enough for a person to stand upright in.

"The entrance to a subaground tunnel!" Greg shouted, leaping up and down in the edge of a wave.

"The entrance to a real pirate cave, you mean!" said Jerry. "Glory, Chris, I really shouldn't wonder if it were. Captain Kidd was up and down the coast here. What if they buried stuff in there and then propped a big chunk of rock up against the hole?"

"Let's tell Mother and Aunt!" said Greg, and started running back down the beach, shouting something all the way.

Mother said, "Nonsense!" and, "Of course it's a natural cave in the rock. You probably only noticed it today."

But she and Aunt Ailsa shut up the H.G. Wells book and came to look. They did think, when they saw it, that it was something new. Aunt Ailsa thought it looked very exciting and mysterious, but she agreed with Mother that it was no sort of place to go to in a boat.

"Just look at the white foam flinging around those rocks," she said; "and there's practically no surf on today."

We were so much excited about the Sea Monster suddenly having a big black hole in it that we almost forgot to take the bottle when we went home. We did forget Aunt Ailsa's hatpin, and Greg had to run back for it, because he can run faster than any of the rest of us, and Captain Lewis held the ferry for him. Everybody leaned out from the rail and peered up the landing, because they thought it must be a fire or the President or something. They all looked awfully disappointed when it was only Greg, with the black necktie still around his head and Aunt's hatpin held very far away from him so that it wouldn't hurt him if he fell down. He tumbled on board just as the nice brown Portuguese man who works the rattley chain thing at the landings was pushing the collapsible gate shut, and Greg gasped:

"I brought--the moidores--too!"

But Jerry collared him and pulled the necktie off his head. Jerry hates to have his relatives look silly in public, but I thought Greg looked very nice.

"Perhaps," said Greg, when we were halfway up Luke Street, going home, and had almost forgotten the bottle, "perhaps it will land on the Sea Monster, and the pirates will find it."

"Glory!" said Jerry, "perhaps it will."

Just in the middle of the rainiest week came the thing that made Aunt Ailsa so sad. She read it in the newspaper, in the casualty list. It was the last summer of the war, and there were great long casualty lists every day. This said that Somebody-or-other Westland was "wounded and missing." We didn't know why it made her so sad, because we'd never heard of such a person, but of course it was up to us to cheer her up as much as possible. Picnics being out of the question, it had to be indoor cheering, which is harder. Greg succeeded better than the rest of us, I think. He is still little enough to sit on people's laps . He sat on Aunt Ailsa's lap and told her long stories which she seemed to like much better than the H.G. Wells books. He also dragged her off to join in attic games, and she liked those, too, and laughed sometimes quite like herself.

Attic games aren't so bad, though summer's not the proper time for them, really. There is a long cornery sort of closet full of carpets that runs back under the eaves in our attic, and if you strew handfuls of beads and tin washers among the carpets and then dig for them in the dark with a hockey-stick and a pocket flash-light, it's not poor fun. Unfortunately, my head knocks against the highest part of the roof now, yet I still do think it's fun. But Aunt Ailsa is twenty-six and she likes it, so I suppose I needn't give up.

The day Aunt Ailsa really laughed was when Greg rigged himself up as an Excavator. That is, he said he was an excavator, but I never saw anything before that looked at all like him. He had the round Indian basket from Mother's work-table on his head, and some automobile goggles, and yards and yards of green braid wound over his jumper, and Mother's carriage-boots, which came just below the tops of his socks. In his hand he had what I think was a rake-handle--it was much taller than he--and he had the queerest, glassy, goggling expression under the basket.

He never will learn to fix proper clothes. He might have seen what he should have done by looking at Jerry, who had an old felt hat with a bit of candle-end stuck in the ribbon, and a bandana tied askew around his neck. But Aunt Ailsa laughed and laughed, which was what we wanted her to do, so neither of us remonstrated with Greg that time.

Father plays the 'cello,--that is, he does when he has time,--and he found time to play it with Aunt, who does piano. I think she really liked that better than the attic games, and we did, too, in a way. The living-room of our house is quite low-ceilinged, and part of it is under the roof, so that you can hear the rain on it. The boys lay on the floor, and Mother and I sat on the couch, and we listened to the rain on the roof and the sound--something like rain--of the piano, and Father's 'cello booming along with it. They played a thing called "Air Religieux" that I think none of us will ever hear again without thinking of the humming on the roof and the candles all around the room and one big one on the piano beside Aunt Ailsa, making her hair all shiny. Her hair is amberish, too, like Greg's, but her eyes are a very golden kind of brown, while his are dark blue.

We thought she'd forgotten about being sad, but one night when I couldn't sleep because it was so hot I heard her crying, and Mother talking the way she does to us when something makes us unhappy. I felt rather frightened, somehow, and wretched, and I covered up my ears because I didn't think Aunt would want me to hear them talking there.

"O little sparrow, Perhaps to-morrow You will fly in a blue house. And perhaps you will run In the sun, Little field-mouse."

Jerry didn't see what Greg meant by a "blue house," but I did, and I think it was rather nice. I copied the poem secretly, before the cigar-box was buried at the end of the rose-bed. I think Greg really cried, but he had so much black mosquito netting hanging over the brim of his best hat that I couldn't be sure.

Then Greg did a fire dance with two sparklers. He dances rather well,--not real one-steps and waltzes, but weird things he makes up himself. This one lasted as long as the sparklers burned, and it was quite gorgeous. After that we had a candle-light procession around the garden, and the grown people said that the candles looked very mysterious bobbing in and out between the trees. We felt more like high priests than patriots, but it was very festive and wonderful, and when we ended by having cakes and lime-juice on the porch at half-past nine, everybody agreed that it had been a real celebration and quite different.

In spite of being up so late the night before, Greg was the first one down to breakfast next morning. Our postman always brings the mail just before the end of breakfast, and we can hear him click the gate as he comes in. This morning Jerry and Greg dashed for the mail together, and Greg squeezed through where Jerry thought he couldn't and got there first. When they came back, Jerry was saying:

"Let me have it, won't you; it'll take you all day!" and dodging his arm over Greg's shoulder.

"Messrs. Christopher, Gerald, and Gregory Holford; 17 Luke Street," Greg read slowly. Then he tripped over the threshold and floundered on to me, flourishing the big envelope and shouting:

"My stars!" said Jerry, with a final snatch.

But I had the envelope, and I looked at it very carefully.

"Boys," I said, "I truly believe that it is."

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